Tue, 02 Dec 2003

One way to check how these newfangled blogging
packages work is to link to a friend's blog entry. No reason necessary, of course. But you'll click on it anyway. (Oh, I have to use the Track back link. I think. And add another attribute to it? I'm confused. )

posted at: 19:09 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 30 Nov 2003

Time for some art.
Check this dude out. So, he's only two years older than I am, and his art clearly qualifies as British nostalgia (Not that there's anything wrong with that!) and I wonder, if anyone feels like telling me, is he showing nostalgia for things he saw in his thirty years, or for a time before his own? Either way, his paintings rock.

And now on tonight's entertainment report: Dame Edna rocks again. And a note for some later reading.

Tue, 25 Nov 2003

Attaching the Python debugger to anaconda for a Redhat Fedora (or RH9) install. (Ongoing progress notes and mutterings to oneself.) I am trying to debug a problem with RH Kickstart and its inability to deal with pre-existing software RAID partitions. To do so I am adding a debugger to tag along with Anaconda, which means taking the right stage 2 cramfs image and modifying the image. To mount the image, the command line is mount -t cramfs foo.img /mount/point -o loop=/dev/loop1 . You then have to cp -R the stuff elsewhere to edit it. cp will inform you of various hard links that it is refusing to set. I replaced them manually with symlinks. mkcramfs then rebuilds the damn thing. (Hat tips: Alex for his pdb wrappers and this dude for related info.)

The line from tracing import set_trace; set_trace() needs adding somewhere in there, preferably not before necessary. Later on some notes on why it is that this bug happens. The things I need to find are: how does the install process choose which of the .img files in Redhat/base to mount for stage 2, so I know where to edit, how do set break points for the .pyc procedures I suspect my problems are in, and then how to make a full out new Disc 1 for the new install procedure. That's the big thing for the week. Important question for the moment: you have a KickStart floppy that starts up an NFS install. Which of the images get used to start up anaconda? 1. /floppy/initrd.img? (gzipped ext2 image, usually. zcat through to a file, mount on loopback.) /nfs/RedHat/base/*.img? (cramfs)

More notes from poking around: init in the initrd.img is an ELF executable, and etc/inittab does not exist.

Wed, 19 Nov 2003

Tonight I finally killed the last bug I was struggling with, and now I have numerical verification of my strange little theory. An initial manuscript will be en route to some people by the end of the week. That makes this the perfect time for me to decide that no, after all, working in the neurosciences is not that great an idea, not from a professional point of view (I don't have the necessary intuition to advance the field there, and my addition to the numerical methods used is tapped out now) or financial (the end of corporate funding is at hand, with the upcoming changes in the laws on drug patents), but philosophical. You see, there are things man was not meant to know. Really. When the priests of Delphi carved the words "Know Thyself," they were demonstrating what a callous bunch of bastards they are.

The scientific ways of approaching the Delphian goal are difficult, compared to the previous known method, of treating the adage as the prompt to get into a collegiate bull session full of navel gazing, circular logic, bad data, cultural prejudices, and come up with some contrived and insufficient insight into the human existence. It worked for Aristotle, and Freud, and Jung, and God help us all, it worked for Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden. That is, for some definitions of "worked." It got them published. It got other people laid. As for the method's success at helping people to know themselves, the less said the better.

About 150 years ago, some poor benighted souls set out to fullfill the Delphian goal through the scientific method. That pursuit has brought out some mighty comical results. Among my favorites is the Kaczynski experiment. (The article to which I link tried to attribute the misunderstood mathematician's descent to madness to the experiment. I do not buy it, and neither did some of the other subjects of it.) The question the experiment sought to answer was what kind of physiological effects are seen in a guy who is being attacked intellectually about his worldview. The method employed was amusing. From the article:

"As Murray [the experiment designer] described it,

First, you are told you have a month in which to write a brief exposition of your personal philosophy of life, an affirmation of the major guiding principles in accord with which you live or hope to live. Second, when you return to the Annex with your finished composition, you are informed that in a day or two you and a talented young lawyer will be asked to debate the respective merits of your two philosophies.

[End of article excerpt.] The utter irreproducibility of any novel finding in such an experiment is obvious. Beyond finding out that this is unpleasant and causes a textbook physiological fight-or-flight response, you can't find anything that can be applied across subjects, because of the huge variation among the subjects in just about every single aspect of the experiment. So your results wind up being published in the medical journal Duh.

When the scientific method fails to find new insights into the human mind, one should be relieved. Because when it does, the consequences can be real bad. Why am I saying this? Because a neuro guy at Johns Hopkins (I think) recently conducted experiments to assess effectiveness of some advertising strategies. The study was done for an advertiser. And that is where neuroscience gets scary. It enables people to engage in pursuits that treat man as a means to an end rather than an end in himself. And I want no more of it. There are other reasons why neuroscience should give you the heebie jeebies. Damn. Ran out of steam for this entry. More on it some time.

Mon, 10 Nov 2003

Yo, check this dude out.


posted at: 23:01 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 25 Oct 2003

Makes me want my mommy.
Go read this guy's movie reviews.

posted at: 22:19 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 23 Oct 2003

Check this out, yo.
Naturally occuring letters on butterfly wings. (From Boing Boing.)

posted at: 20:03 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 20 Oct 2003

Lovely place for a holiday.
A quote regarding Ultima Thule (i.e. Iceland), by the monk Dicuil, scholar in residence at the court of Charlemagne:

It is now the thirtieth year since some monks who dwelt upon that island told me that not only during the summer solstice but also during the days near that time, toward evening the setting sun hides itself as if behind a small hill, so that there is no darkness for even a very short time; but a man may do whatever he wishes, actually pick the lice from his shirt as if it were by the light of the sun; and if they had been on top of the mountains the sun probably never would have hidden from their eyes.

Mon, 13 Oct 2003

Rock on, dudes.
When you're a tad irked at how New Age gurus turn your religon into worthless mush, you can't help cheering these Native Americans for speaking out against it.

posted at: 00:13 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 08 Oct 2003

Wondering what is going on with North Korea?
Wonder no more.

posted at: 23:13 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 07 Oct 2003

posted at: 15:11 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 06 Oct 2003

All you really need to know about life, you
can learn from Field and Stream.

Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this pictorial account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is full of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour those sidelights on the management of a midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's "Practical Gamekeeping." -- Ed Zern, "Field and Stream" (Nov. 1959)

Sun, 05 Oct 2003

How's this for an afternoon's doodle? It's amazing how a some very simple gimping can take mediocre drawings like mine and make them look pretty decent. For example, another version of yesterday's drawing. The propagate values distortion transform is perfect for preserving the texture of pen shadings when you shrink down a sketch to make an icon.

Fri, 03 Oct 2003

(Hat tip: Boing Boing)
How to make C++ speak AIM. And here's me playing with a couple pens.

posted at: 23:12 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 29 Sep 2003

Hmm...

As I was walking up the stair I saw an avatar that wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. He must be from the CIA.

Link propagation time: Wendell Berry. 'nuff said. No particular reason. A final test for using the console diary and the Blxosom wrapper. It works. I am happy. (All it needed was to get rid of that [ ] feature in CBD.)

Sun, 28 Sep 2003

Sunday, September 28, 2003
Well now, isn't this better?

posted at: 23:28 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 27 Sep 2003

Bloxsom and console-based diary combined.

Here's how you do it. After downloading Bloxsom from Bloxsom.com, I edited the following lines so that it would make sense for the Athena environment. First I wrote a wrapper script that adds in the password option. On Athena, there is no non-command line context for invoking bloxsom, so that option should be unnecessary. More on the wrapper later.

In the script itself, some lines need to be modified:

# Where are this blog's entries kept?
$datadir = "$ENV{HOME}/www/bloxsom";
# What's my preferred base URL for this blog (leave blank for automatic)?
$url = "http://www.mit.edu/~$ENV{USER}";
[...]
# Where are my plugins kept?
# Users for the moment will have to mkdir this dir and
# put symlinks to plugins they want, which will
# point to plugins in /mit/outland/share/bloxom/plugins
$plugin_dir = "$ENV{HOME}/www/bloxsom/plugins";
[..]
# Where should my modules keep their state information?
$plugin_state_dir = "$plugin_dir/state";

Next comes combining this tool with the console based diary. I already mentioned that in a previous entry. It involves taking the diary script, adding a $SUFFIX variable all over the place, changing all the ls command lines to use it properly, and assigning the variable the value ".txt." Presto, a non-HTTP web diary.

And here is a second test of the combination. Does it work if I feed it after midnight? Apparently not. For reasons I am not grokking, it insists on touching the last entry prior to the current one. Very odd, that. I think it's the task-list promotion part of the script that does that. I'll need to disable it. And it's time to for a little Google fudging, as requested by Dan Gillmor.

Trying too damn hard sometimes....
This is a test for combining Bloxsom with the console-based-diary to make the most minimally written Web diary available for people serving static pages on machines where they have shell accounts. The way to do it is to download the CBD from the link above, diff it against my modifications and then set up a diaryrc file in their .diary that will direct the CBD to put its entries in the Bloxsom directory and give them the suffix ".txt", like so. Presto. Type "diary" to write the day's entry, and "bloxsom" to process it with your Bloxsom templates and what-have-you.

posted at: 00:28 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 26 Sep 2003

Boston area note. Howard Dean is giving a major speech, titled "Democracy, Freedom, and Action," in Copley Square on Tuesday. Now's a good chance for Boston area folks to give this guy a lookover. Not sure I'd vote for him, but a friend of mine is Dean's web-monkey, so he can't be all bad.

And on another note, (gotten from Boing Boing), important consumer information for those of you wanting to pop p1lls to gr0w y0ur p3n1ses.

Sat, 20 Sep 2003

Ahem.
Now this is important.

posted at: 03:39 | path: /Politics | permanent link to this entry

The cinematic crimes of Mel Gibson.
It's time to get this rant out of my head. I'm not sure when or if Gibson's new film The Passion will be played in theaters in the US. No actual showings are indicated in the fan website. There's plenty of bloviation on the web on the questions of whether the movie, or Mel Gibson, or both, are antisemitic. My call is for neither, but that doesn't mean Gibson should have made this movie, nor that he should be free of suspicion. There are two reasons to criticize Gibson for making this movie and claiming he is not using it to advance his own hate.

In the Middle Ages, the Church used morality plays and passion plays to teach its doctrine to a largely illiterate laity. The practice has declined in our day since the laity can read the Bible for itself and is less in need of this form of instruction. And it can also visit the video store. But there was also another problem with passion plays. Their re-enactments of the crucifiction would rile up the audience, which would then riot and attack whatever luckless Jews happened by. In this century, Catholic doctrine emphatically does not blame The Jews for the crucifiction, and the Catholic Church is fervently opposed to anything that might cause it to be associated with an act of violence. The Catholic Church does not want Passion plays to feed anyone's hate, and so it has published Criteria for the Evaluation of Dramatizations of the Passion. At least some folks are saying that these criteria have not been followed. But another reason to be suspicious about Gibson is that he has, in the past, made movies to cater to an undeniable pet hate of his. The dude has a bee in his bonnet when it comes to the English, and it's because of the whole Henry VIII thing.

Consider the following synopsis of Braveheart: a young Scot returns from a grand tour of Europe, including pilgrimage to Rome, to his Scottish hometown, to discover that the Scots are straining under the English and are preparing to rebel. On his first day back he witnesses as a young Scottish woman is carried away by soldiers, to be raped by a skanky English nobleman because of the law of prima nocta. On her wedding day. In full view of her impotently furious newlywed husband and the entire wedding party. Does the young Scot decide to join the rebels? Nah. She isn't his girl. But he does make changes to his own wedding plans and has it done in secret. But that fails, and an English soldier molests his new wife, she resists, and is killed for it, and now our young Scot is angry.

So soon he gets some of his fellow Scots, gives a speech, the gist of which is "I didn't care then, but now they killed my girl, and I want to kick ass, and I know a thing or too about how that can be done. So, how about it?" And the Scots say "cool. How about you be our leader?" Butt kicking ensues. Our young Scot dies. Butt kicking resumes. Fade to black. Roll credits. Vile. Braveheart is a completely and utterly vile movie. And then, Gibson does it again in The Patriot. Read the link. It's what I'm paraphrasing in my description of Braveheart. And the Brothers Judd echo the same issues.

So what is the lesson learned from Braveheart and The Patriot? The English suck. They're terrible people. They kick dogs and eat kittens, and leer lecherously and their mothers dress them funny. They suck. They really really really suck. Gibson clearly believes this. He believes this so strongly, that in order to demean the English, he demeans the American colonists and the Scots. In both movies a man joins an ongoing struggle in a way that demonstrates that his motives are personal and therefore he should not be trusted. Nevertheless, the Scots and the colonists are stupid enough to put the Gibson character in command. He also demeans the enemies of the English by protraying them as such worthless murderous lecherous scum, implying that if the English were just slightly less heinous, only raping innocents but not massacring them (for example), then the colonists and the Scots would not have fought against them. That is certainly not the case when it comes to the American Revolution. The colonists were far quicker to rise against the Redcoats, and that is a compliment of sorts. They demanded high standards of conduct from the Redcoats and they were quick to fight against them for far milder infractions. The Patriot carries the strong implication that only Nazi-like behavior would have caused the rebellion. That is an affront to the men who fought in Lexington. On both sides.

Mais revenons a nos moutons. I hope this post shows just how low Gibson chose to sink in two previous movies, to indulge his pet hatred. In so doing, he managed to malign two groups he supposedly admires: the Scots and the Americans. He also managed to debase the notion of patriotism. Can anyone seriously think that a movie he makes of the Passion of Christ will treat the subject with any more thoughtfullness?

Fri, 19 Sep 2003

This is a test of bloxsom categories.


posted at: 05:49 | path: /Stupid | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 18 Sep 2003

MIT-bloxsom is now close to up and running.
I just have to add a few things to it to make it a little more user configurable and then I can announce it.

posted at: 00:19 | path: /Main | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 17 Sep 2003

Dear Diary...
This is a test of the bloxsom web diary system. I installed this in the MIT Outland locker and added several of the plugins that are floating around. It will take a little more to make this fully useful. Among other problems is the over reliance on file time stamps and the bloxsom script not realizing that changes to the templates are another issue entirely. Another is the calendar plugin that needs some way to relay font management. But that can wait a while.

posted at: 20:20 | path: /Main | permanent link to this entry

Foo.


posted at: 19:23 | path: /Main | permanent link to this entry